What got me out of academia (yup, I was a professor) was:

Do you have vast field experience and want to get into the classroom to teach how it's really done? Tough luck, you should've spent your time writing papers.

No matter how much you know or how good you are, everything is about feeding the maximalist machine, if you're an outlier, worse people with better "scores", more papers and never leaving faculty will forever beat you until they retire.

I took a good look at the publishing process. Absolutely everything about it was back-channeling to carefully select the topic, scope and reviewers of a paper to get it through the process. Goodhart's Law at its finest.

Advice given to me: "aim for a lower rank and be happy with teaching the whole thing while the old professor takes a nap in the corner".

AI or not AI, anything destroying that self-perpetuating bureaucracy is welcome.

As for the remaining 99%, maybe they should stop pretending they know (and giving advice) about navigating a typical production code base.

1% are the absolutely brilliant minds that academia was originally created for. People that, without a doubt, leave their mark in the vast corpus of human knowledge. I consider myself fortunate for meeting and learning from them, and I thank the academia ecosystem for that.

But the remaining 99% are the maximalists, as described in the article. More papers/students/grants, then repeat. Worse enough, they're absolutely useless outside of academia, as they never did anything at all outside that bubble.

An embarrassing lot of CS professors would stumble around your average production codebase.

I think AI is just the final nail in the coffin for the latter bunch, as they have been dogs eating their own tail for decades already.

That's why I'd love an interview with Steam's legal head. Sounds like they'd have some wild stories to share.

It's similar to the "old Internet" argument: it's still there, but buried in layers and layers of stuff that isn't the real thing.

My grandmother used to grow her own vegetables and fruits and had a minimal chicken farm for eggs until the early 2000s, all in her regular backyard, it's not ancient history or something that required a lot of real state.

Now there's a 15-story building and no land whatsoever where her house used to be.

The original post sums it pretty well, such big output inherently meant big effort, which was a proxy for good faith. Now that's gone.

Not my point either. I was just referring to the tooling changing over time, with the discipline constantly evolving forward nonetheless.

But it was so great as a tool that some engineers didn't want to deal with the burdens and limitations of the physical world, and started focusing on software more and more.

Then the software engineers came, for whom the physical and mathematical aspect of the whole thing was just a distant history lesson (and preferably a problem in someone else's computer).

And after software engineers, the only constant in the entire ordeal will remain: engineering, in a shape or form that very likely nobody can predict right now.

After a few generations (and over a decade) that was indistinguishable from the CPU chip itself.

It's a long hyperbole, I know, but I think local inference is inevitable; and the big fishes know it.

Will that be a complex technical setup? An appliance? An additional chip in your motherboard? So transparent it's burned right into the CPU? Those are just implementation details. We're probably just one generational breakthrough away from it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87

If you were there, you'd remember the UTF8/Unicode fiasco (how long it took, how many people was both relying and struggling with it, and how they needed to cover it up after even some hosting providers attempted a beta upgrade and had to roll it back).

There was a PHP 6 (I'm including the non-updates in PHP 5 "waiting" for it), they just had to rewrite history as of PR damage control back then. That's what the article you linked describes, pretty much.

Paid my share of dealing with those problems with PHP 5 and 6 (after coming from PHP 4). I think it became a more sane ecosystem around very late 7.x to 8.

I won't touch PHP ever again, but I'm glad (no irony) that they finally were able to pull it off. There were some good ideas there, then they quickly became victims of their own success.

Nowadays, there's places (Amazon) where PHP is just forbidden at a company-wide level (not joking) because of their early, long-standing reputation of being a mess. Or places where they just gave up and re-implemented their own PHP (Meta). I don't see that changing any time soon.

Also Lars Von Trier is objectively not involved in this (only in Dogma 95, which this is "based on").

There's nothing romantic in progress-adverse, ostracized, uncivilized lifestyles. There's only a small subset of people that would really find it preferable in practice. In the best of cases it implies grueling non-stop hard work. And still you're one bad winter away from being obliterated.

The world is a complex place, but if you find it unnecessarily complicated, scientific and technological progress are not the problem.

It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.

However, every single time I feel like stricter regulation should be in place, a congressman speaks about "servers"... and yeah, maybe not.